According to canon
law, a pardoner or quaestor of alms did not have the right either to forgive
sin or to sell indulgences. Indulgences remitting punishment for sin could
only be legitimately granted to persons who confessed their sins to their
own parish priests. If the condition of confession is met, they were allowed
to purchase indulgences and thus be relieved of a stated period of purgatorial
punishment.

Many pardoners were
commissioned directly from Rome, and offered indulgences to all those
subjects who contributed to the support of Christendom. Some pardoners
were sent from church-supported hospitals. These hospitals, often times
the repository of relics used in curing the sick, commissioned pardoners
to take these relics on tour and to offer indulgences to anyone who was
moved by their belief in the relics to donate money toward the upkeep
of the hospital.

The practice of offering
indulgences grew corrupt. Selling indulgences became a means for the Church
to be able to finance special projects, such as the construction of the
Vatican in the sixteenth century. Pardoners also tended to exaggerate
the power of their indulgences—that is, they sometimes pretended to have
the authority to release the buyers from hell as well as from purgatory.
They might sometimes also claim that those who purchased indulgences needed
neither to repent nor to amend their lives in order to be pardoned.

As early as 1212 the
Church acknowledged the corrupt practices of many pardoners. Church officials
created numerous bulls recommending that the practice of pardoners be
restricted: that they not be allowed to preach but only to read their
letters; that every precaution be taken to ensure that only fully licensed
pardoners could solicit alms. At the same time, popular literature satirized
pardoners. When the preaching friar in Piers the Plowman wishes to scorn
the Augustinians, his worst accusation is that they lived by the "pur
pardoners craft."